Wednesday, February 27, 2008

I know something about this subprime business through my work and this story on BoingBoing caught my eye.

Joe Lents hasn't made a payment on his $1.5 million mortgage since 2002. That's when Washington Mutual Inc. first tried to foreclose on his home in Boca Raton. The Seattle-based lender failed to prove that it owned Lents' mortgage note and dropped attempts to take his house. Subsequent efforts to foreclose have stalled because no one has produced the paperwork.

"If you're going to take my house away from me, you better own the note," said Lents, 63, the former chief executive officer of a now-defunct voice recognition software company. --Tampa Bay Online

It's a fact that through the relentless re-packaging and re-selling of thousands of these loans many banks have lost the paperwork on the houses they own. Unlike Japan which maintains a central repository for this sort of thing, it's the mortgage holder in the U.S. that is responsible.

This problem, that the mortgage companies would like to not publicize, is huge. Quite possibly affecting up to $2 trillion dollars worth of mortgages. If you are a homeowner who is in foreclosure procedures, or even being threatened. Make the bank prove they own your home. The banks share a large percentage of blame for this subprime crisis.